


and all i could hear was your pulse

by belatrix



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M, Soul Bond, Suicidal Thoughts, non-con elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 15:06:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10165643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: He thinks about heading towards the lake, where he can lie down and look at the stars and suffer in silence, without bothering anyone. Perhaps if things get worse the Order will mercifully decide to kill him after all, will put both himself and Voldemort out of their mutual misery. It’d be a joke on poetic justice, certainly.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I _know_ this has been done to death, but i couldn't resist. 
> 
> (also, can someone please just hug harry and give him all the chocolate yes thank you ✿)

 

 

The world around him still feels like a flash of green, even after Cedric’s corpse has begun to grow cold on the ground. The statue digs into Harry’s body in sharp angles, blunt knives trying to tear through him, and all he can see is the cauldron, the smoke, the body, the body, the _body_ ―

It takes form, ashen white, a flesh-skeleton floating in air for the space of a single breath before it becomes a figure limned in shadows, clothed in dark fabric, turning slowly around. It’s the earth spinning on its axis, too fast and too slow.

Harry thinks this is the end of all things, and he almost feels like laughing at the horror and the melodrama of it all.

Perhaps it would stop him from crying. (He’s fifteen years old.)

The voice from his dreams is everywhere, eclipsing all thought and reason. Drowning on impossibility and terror, Harry’s mind implodes on the thought of the scenery’s surrealism, Voldemort’s robes swirling and shaking like living, gasping things as the nightmare turns to man and the man is revealed to be a monster, a devil out of storybooks without the pair of horns.

He must have screamed himself raw already, because no sound comes when Harry opens his mouth to cry out. Everything he might have wanted to say gets trapped in his throat, non-words stuck behind his teeth.

He knows he’s going to die. He thinks he’s heard, somewhere, that the Killing Curse doesn’t hurt. He wonders if he’ll see his parents, all sad smiles and outstretched hands―

“Harry Potter,” Voldemort says, tasting it, hissing, spitting the name out like it was his all along. He lifts his head shining like a snake’s skull, looks at Harry. And everything _stops_.

 

 

There’s a pair of eyes, red with freshly spilled blood. And there’s nothing else.

Harry’s insides burn, his veins twisting and melting, flames coiling tight around his spine. The scar on his forehead is breaking apart, carving his head into jagged, festering halves. A thunderstorm underneath his skin. He’s being pulled forward by something cold and invisible, towards Voldemort with horrible precision, a rope tangled around his heart that he tries to fight with everything he has, and fails.

Harry screams.

Over the sound of his own lifeblood beating hard inside its cage, he thinks he can hear Voldemort scream, too.

 

 

He wakes with Cedric’s name on his lips, to an old blue stare that seems to hold all the world’s secrets and all the world’s frantic worry. “Harry,” Dumbledore breathes, in a startled, defeated sort of voice that Harry could not associate with the headmaster even if he tried his damnedest.

A beat too late, he tries to sit up in a flurry of kicking limbs and sweat-drenched hair, but a sudden wave of terrible headache makes his teeth rattle and sends him tumbling back into the pillows, with a muffled thud and a groan.

“The Cup,” he manages to get out, his own voice hoarse and choked, alien to his ears. “The _Cup_. It was a― it is―”

“Yes,” Dumbledore says, all soothing tones, like he understands. Harry can feel a scream bubbling up inside his chest, straining to push out, and squeezes his eyes shut against another onslaught of pain.

“Give the boy a bloody painkiller,” someone shouts, followed by a litany of worried mutters and sharp admonishments. “ _Where_ is the―”

Harry opens his eyes again, sees shadows in the periphery of his vision. There’s something humming, going _scratch scratch scratch_ in the back of his brain, and it takes him a moment to realize there’s Sirius frantically shouldering his way to Harry’s bedside, pushing past a puffy-eyed Hermione and an a deathly pale Ron.

“Harry,” his godfather says, urgent, and Harry wants to hug him, he wants to say something too, he wants to throw himself in Ron and Hermione’s arms, he wants them all to hold him while he screams it all away, he doesn’t know _what_ he wants.

A snake slithers like a phantom in front of him, a snake no one else sees, and a cold voice whispers from within Harry’s own head, words that tumble into each other and words he can’t make sense of.

Harry buries his face in his hands.

“No,” he says, to no one in particular. It’s more sob than word, more cry than anything. He thinks, abruptly, of running past everyone as fast as his legs can carry him and flinging himself from the Astronomy Tower. “ _No_.”

Dumbledore seems to be the only one who understands, but he does not reach out to touch; he stares, deep and resigned in a way that almost makes Harry want to _hurt_ him.

“No―” he shakes his head, and doesn’t exactly know if he wants to laugh or cry. He’s aware it’s all very hysterical. “No, _no_ ―”

He stops himself, because really, there is nothing he can say. They’re all looking at him like he’s dying, caught between mortified and straining to help, and he looks back, feeling everything and nothing all at once. Because, _because_ ―

―only a fraction of one thousandth of wizards and witches have ever been known to have found a soulmate, to have been _bound_ to them, and Harry stared his in the eye at a graveyard just outside Little Hangleton only a few hours ago.

He swallows, and blinks. “No,” he says again, just for the sake of it.

 

 

Voldemort hovers in the periphery of his thoughts, alternating between white-hot scorching pain and a dull thud. He’s an outline in black and grey swirling inside Harry’s head, an endless murmur of nonsensical words and terrible emotions that crash and burn before they can take form.

School is reaching its end, the sun stitched golden into the sky as the last of the students filter out of the Great Hall, having shed their tears for brave Cedric Diggory. The newspapers are aflame, Harry’s face plastered on every front page; Ron and Hermione never let him out of their sight, flanking him like soldiers through Hogwarts’ halls.

But he’s there, Voldemort, a low humming noise beating persistently in Harry’s ears, a piece of himself that Harry would gladly hack off with a cleaver if it were possible to physically cut yourself in two, separate your own soul so utterly that the other half would cease to exist altogether, bludgeoned to death.

Harry bites down on his lip until he tastes blood. _Get out_ , he thinks, screams. _Get out, get out, get out_ ―

It takes him half the day before he realizes Voldemort is projecting the exact same emotion. Desperation. Confusion. _Rage_.

“How do you feel?” Hermione asks him every second hour, soft and tentative and fighting back something that looks like tears in her eyes.

Harry just keeps re-arranging all his belongings in neat rows across his bed for the seventh time that day. He has to keep himself distracted, occupied, or he knows he’ll go mad. “I’m fine,” he says, except he hasn’t been, ever. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

 

 

Harry is told that Dumbledore sent a cordial, vague letter to the Dursleys, informing them that their nephew will not be able to return to Privet Drive for the summer. Ron tells him that he overheard his mother speaking with the others― saying that they can’t _possibly_ leave Harry alone in the Muggle world, given the _situation_. The shield must mean nothing, now.

(Ron tells him other things, as well. He talks about fighters, organizations, an _Order_. Harry doesn’t hear half of it.)

But he’s not going back. Harry has never heard better news in his entire life, but still he spends the night muffling his shouts into the pillow, dreaming of red eyes and silver scales whispering across gravestones.

 

 

The headaches return as soon as he’s ushered into Grimmauld Place, and they’re everywhere, hammering, all at once, bringing him to his knees and having everyone around him gasp and rush to his side, panic painted across every face.

It’s Dumbledore who asks the questions, with that sort of otherworldly calmness that leaves Harry wondering if the old man is human after all. _What do you hear, what do you see, is the pain centered around your scar, what, who, why, what, what, what_.

He is pushed gently onto a bed, cold compresses over his head and healing magic floating around him, and Mrs Weasley leaves bowls of chicken soup and cake on a tray at his feet. _You have to eat_ , she says, the loving mother he never had growing up.

Harry could have killed everyone in the house.

He groans, and he _hurts_ , and as Hermione clutches his hand in hers and Ron tries to get a distraught, frighteningly protective Sirius out of the room― Harry knows, he _knows_ why he feels like he’s dying, why he’s breathless and burning all over; Voldemort has left, is very certainly out of the country and as far away as he can get, perhaps in search of answers, a solution, anything. And Harry’s soul is _breaking_ at this, crying out at the distance separating them, and the mere realization leaves Harry panting and horrified, curled in on himself on the bed as if protecting an inner flame from dying out.

With great force, Harry wills himself to believe that this is good, this is what he wants: Voldemort as far away as he can physically be. But his head throbs again at the thought, as in retaliation, as in a taunt.

Something strangled flies past his lips.

He concentrates on not thinking of Voldemort, tries to hold onto his anger and his grief and his hatred for the man who killed his parents, who killed thousands, who is a monster and not a man at all. He tries to focus on anything other than the pain that rattles his bones in protest of being away from Voldemort, in need of being close, close, _close_ ―

“Kill me,” he says, and it’s hoarse like he’s been yelling, or crying. Hermione’s grip tightens like a vice around his hand at that, and Ron goes still. “God, please, just kill me.”

He could ask them to kill Voldemort, instead. At this point, there is no difference.

Hermione makes a low sniffling sound, takes a steadying breath. “Stop being an idiot and eat the soup before it gets cold,” she says, sharp and choked.

Harry does. Everything tastes like blood in his mouth.

 

 

The days roll into each other, a kaleidoscopic blur of blue and gold and grey as the summer trickles away. Harry stays secreted away in Grimmauld Place, holed up in the bedroom he shares with Ron and trailing through the halls like a ghost. He almost doesn’t even hear Walburga every time she starts to screech.

Sirius is ready to fight the world in defense of Harry, perpetually arguing with Dumbledore about the correct way to approach this unshakeable _connection_ he shares with the most dangerous man in Wizarding memory. Molly smothers him in hugs and cooks all his favorite meals, while Tonks makes valiant efforts to make him laugh. Lupin looks at him with something like sadness and offers him chocolate with a wan, knowing smile, and Snape floats in and out of the house like an apparition, whispering in Dumbledore’s ear and not sparing Harry a sideways glance. The twins pretend nothing has changed and treat Harry the exact same, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been more thankful for anything in his entire life. Ginny squeezes his shoulder in reassurance, her gaze steady when it meets his own.

By the end of July, he can’t stay in the house a moment longer.

He paces until his shoes wear holes in the carpets, trying to fight off the sizzling sensation that rips through him every time his mind is synchronized with Voldemort’s, even when he can’t make out the thoughts and emotions that travel through and project inside his head. Everything he looks at reminds Harry of _him_ , but instead of the fear and the anger and the grief that's been dragging his heart down like lead all his life, there’s something new there― a terrible, nervous sort of anticipation, an undeniable longing, near-shattering in its intensity. The thought of being close, of being touched.

He vomits his breakfast and his lunch, and still his head won’t clear, still the disgust pools inside him to rot.

“You must stay here,” they all tell him, and he’s never wanted to punch a hole through a wall as much as he does these days. “It’s too dangerous, now.”

 _Now that Voldemort wants to be as close as possible as much as he wants to kill you_ , they don’t say, but he hears it all the same. He isn’t sure he can trust the people who love him.

But every muscle in Harry’s body is coiled tight like a spring, ready to break. His heart sputters and hits against his chest. He needs to go _out_ , let sunlight wash over his face and pretend that dark magic and soul bonds and murderers are pages out of some twisted old fairytale, not the outline of Harry’s life.

“Talk to me about something, anything,” he says to Ron and Hermione, an off tilt rising in his voice. He knows they don’t miss that note of bubbling hysteria. “I just ―a distraction, I need a distraction.”

Hermione’s head is buried in books; huge, dusty things she’s smuggled from every bookshelf she could reach, everything libraries and the Blacks’ old collection have to offer on ancient soul magic and unbreakable bonds of the mind and heart.

“Not about _that_ ,” Harry says, eyeing the covers. “Anything but that, anything you want.”

Ron brings them ice cream and starts informing him of all the latest highlights of the summer Quidditch matches. Hermione pipes in with knowledge about statistics and the magic of broomsticks, and Harry, he gets lost in it for a while. As the hours pass he lets the sounds of conversation and the distant muffled voices from the kitchen lull him into an easy sort of detachment, and if he closes his eyes he can almost pretend this is normal, they’re all normal.

He decides to savor this as long as it lasts, to take everything he can keep until he and Voldemort finally manage to kill each other in the most anticlimactic manner imaginable ―by staying apart.

 

 

“I’m so tired,” he says, leaning into someone’s shoulder. It’s Ginny, maybe. “I just―”

There’s something like a laugh, cool and smooth and lilting, reverberating. Shaking him from the inside. The flashes in his mind brighten and multiply; Voldemort is as amused by Harry’s predicament ―their mutual slow destruction― as he is frustrated.

Harry’s tired, and it’s not going away.

 

 

Lazy sunlight gives way to thin sheets of rain, and with the change comes the promise of extended torment.

School starts anew, slow and heavy. People look up as he walks by, drawn out of their own thoughts like magnets, by rote. They whisper behind their hands when they think he can’t hear, and Ron glares at all of them while Hermione links her arm through his and tosses her head, mare-like; Harry knows how lucky he is to have them both. The other students give him a wide berth, Dumbledore keeps a watchful eye, and Snape slips him potions for his headaches with the most hateful sneer imaginable as war looms over all their heads like a liquid shadow, closing in around the school like metal hooks.

At night, his dreams are filled with skin pale as starched bone, hands like spiderwebs drawing invisible wounds into his flesh. Something ice-cold wrapping around him, pulling him into a vast nothingness.

Harry wakes up with screams lodged in his throat, heart heavy from the injustice of it all. But he’s covered in sweat and he’s burning and he’s hard as he throws the covers off himself, crosses the way to the bathroom on trembling feet. He thinks about smashing his head into the mirror, letting glass shards cut through his face until he’s bled clean, until he falls lifeless to the tiled floor―

―but the image brings an overwhelming flash of anger, a row rumbling from within the deepest corners of his head, a protest that is not his own.

He has to stop himself from laughing; Voldemort wants to keep Harry alive as desperately as he wants to murder him, and it almost makes Harry feel sorry for him.

 

 

At the Dursleys’, Harry heard that you can make up for sin by going to church and sitting in a dark box, tell a kindly old man what you’ve done wrong in hushed whispers, recite a prayer or two before bed once back at home.

This is not the kind of absolution he needs.

Harry imagines Voldemort as a phantom limb, one that he cuts off again and again and again in his mind, as many times as it takes until he stops thinking, until he can imagine the blood and the pain, pure and cathartic.

It does not work.

Voldemort stays, curled up behind Harry’s eyes, lying supine in his ribcage. Whispering in the night, whispering in the day, nonsense words filling up the spaces between bones. Harry wonders if this is what he does to Voldemort, in turn.

The thing is, Harry _wants_. He wants, he wants―

 

 

Winter comes early, and he’s thankful for it. It’s easier ―more justified― to be depressed when you’re surrounded by grey skies and snow, Harry thinks.

The castle is asleep (but not really; Hogwarts always stretches and curls and whispers like a careful animal, sizzling with magic) when Harry pads his way along winding corridors, down shifting stairs. He has his cloak draped over shoulders and head, shielding him from the world. He knows this, by now the motions almost a careless routine. It’s not the first time he’s going about places he shouldn’t be at, in the middle of the night; no one and nothing notices him as he slips outside, straight into the biting cold. Absurdly, he thinks he should have put on warmer clothes, his Muggle pajamas decidedly not made for long walks through fresh snow.

And walk he does. He thinks about heading towards the lake, where he can lie down and look at the stars and suffer in silence, without bothering anyone. Perhaps if things get worse the Order will mercifully decide to kill him after all, will put both himself and Voldemort out of their mutual misery. It’d be a joke on poetic justice, certainly.

Harry walks until his legs ache, and then he stops, because he’s not at the lake. The Forbidden Forest stretches out around, dark skeleton-trees lifting up to the skies. For a moment, he’s terrified. Harry’s not a stranger to getting lost, but he’s never ended up in one place after having headed with utter clarity to another.

He shudders as if trying to shake monsters off his back. The cloak slithers from his shoulders, pools around his feet on the ground.

Harry doesn’t see the figure that comes up to him from behind, floating through the trees like smoke. He doesn’t hear it either, not until the air’s knocked out of him and he realizes he’s being pushed face first into the nearest tree, splinters scratching at his skin.

His arm is grabbed, twisted behind his back before he can reach for his wand.

“Harry Potter,” and it’s the same voice, _the same voice_. The name is a curse whispered violently against the skin of Harry’s neck. An insult and a prayer, all at once.

“Voldemort,” he says, muffled by the tree, feeling like he’ll choke on his own heartbeat. His head hurts so much he's sure it’ll snap in half, but his blood thrums and sings in his veins and he feels alive, overwhelmed, desperate. Not because Voldemort is pressing a wand into the small of his back like it’s a blade, not because this is the man who destroyed his life, not because he might die here after all ―but because Voldemort’s _touching_ him, a trail of fire in every place skin meets skin, even through heavy robes.

“Voldemort,” he repeats, breathless, but it feels wrong and he shifts, tries to move within the trap of tree and death-white arms. “ _Tom_.”

He’s blinded by a flash of white before being flung through the air. He comes crashing down into a heap of mud and stones, every muscle screaming out in protest, his glasses fallen off. Harry fumbles back to his feet, shaking.

“Do not say that name,” Voldemort says, and his voice might have sent men running. But Harry breathes out, taking a stumbling step forward. Voldemort won’t kill him, and Harry thinks he wants him to. Or maybe it’s something else he wants, and he’s too horrified by it to make the safe, sane decision to start running.

He looks into red eyes like they’re benediction. “Tom,” he says again, sharper, angrier, high and strangled.

Voldemort would scream in rage, Harry knows this, but they’re suddenly plunged into flashing light like bleeding welts through the air around them. It’s too bright, burning, drawing them together and drawing them apart.

In the end, it’s Harry who screams. “Tom,” and it’s barely his own voice. “ _Tom_ ―”

 

 

When Harry opens his eyes, his face is being pushed into the ground, a cold hand curling around his neck like a noose.

“ _Why_ ,” Tom says into his hair, “do you always have to ruin my plans?”

It takes him a moment to register they’re still in the Forbidden Forest, the night damp and cool and starless. Harry’s clothes are soaked through with snow and mud, and the weight on top of him is unrelenting, shifting, decidedly human.

He turns his head and it hurts, but he catches a flash of dark hair and dark eyes and pale skin, thin pink lips twisted into a cruel curve. It leaves him breathless and wondering. Harry remembers a diary soaked in basilisk venom, a handsome ghost breaking apart, evaporating before his eyes.

“Don’t,” he says between panting gasps because he doesn’t want this, he doesn't, he _doesn’t_ , but his whole body arches up to meet Tom’s when he feels a hand snake around his waist, fingers digging harsh into hips. Tom bites down at Harry’s neck like he hates this more than Harry does, and tells him to be quiet.

 

 

They’re rolling through snow but it feels like fire.

Harry keeps his eyes closed and repeats to himself he doesn’t want this, knows it’s a lie. He’s in pain with the sheer need of it, feels Tom’s own pleasure reverberating through him, each one getting hard because the other is. He tries to feel horrible, he tries to loathe it, but he _wants_ every tiny bit of skin Tom presses up against him, every long lick against his collarbone, every deep scratch down his arms and ribcage. Tom’s hands are like knives, cutting him open and letting him bleed, crazed heart a red tangle of veins in the middle of it all.

“Don’t,” he says again, but none of them truly hears it.

Tom wraps long fingers around his cock and Harry touches and pulls and kisses and bites until he can’t differentiate between himself and Tom, until they’re a mess of limbs and gasps and exhaled curses in the middle of the woods, two halves made whole.

“I’ll kill you,” Tom says, high and desperate. He buries his face in Harry’s neck and rocks against him like he’s dying, hand still gripping Harry and not letting go.

Harry pushes into Tom’s hand and grasps at Tom's hair, pulling until the sounds Tom’s making into the column of Harry’s throat are both pain and pleasure. “Yes,” he says, throwing his head back, he doesn’t know what he’s saying, god, he doesn’t know what he’s _saying_ ― “But not yet, okay?”

 _I hate you_ , he wants to shout, even as he’s about to come with Tom’s name finding its way to Harry’s lips, even as his back arches off the ground and he’s begging for it in every way he knows how, with loud moans and rolling hips and nails running down Tom’s back in angry red lines.

“I will _destroy_ you,” Tom says, but it’s more moan than words, muffled by Harry’s own whimpers. “I―”

Harry pulls Tom’s head up by the hair, presses their lips together just to make him shut up.

 

 

In the Gryffindor common room, Harry sits cross-legged on the carpet, staring at the fire and wishing he could touch it, let it burn him.

His skin still prickles from the touch of phantom fingers and outside snow still falls. He thinks of dark eyes and a mouth of roses and he thinks of a white skull with a blood-red glare. _Never again_ , he says to no one, his voice carrying and echoing off the walls.

Somewhere inside his head, there’s a cold, half-hearted laugh like a flash of green.

 

 


End file.
